A hearing can't give anyone their job back

A hearing can't give anyone their job back

On July 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Senator Rand Paul. Across a hearing that ran more than two hours, he said one sentence, 24 words , invoking his Fifth Amendment right and declining to answer questions.

Whatever you make of that, and people make very different things of it, it is worth being clear about one point: nothing that happened in that room returned a single paycheck to a single person.

We say that without cynicism. Congressional oversight has a function, and it is not the function of a court. But if you are one of the people who lost a job over a vaccination or testing policy, it is worth understanding the difference , because the two processes offer very different things, and only one of them is available to you personally.

What a hearing can do

A congressional hearing can compel testimony, generate a record, produce documents, and inform legislation. It can shift public understanding. Those are real powers.

What it cannot do is adjudicate your claim. A committee cannot order your employer to reinstate you. It cannot award back pay. It cannot find that your religious accommodation request was wrongly denied. It has no jurisdiction over the relationship between you and the hospital, county, or company that let you go. However a hearing concludes, your individual situation is exactly where it was the day before.

What a court can do

A court can order specific things for specific people.

In an employment religious accommodation case brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or the Minnesota Human Rights Act, the remedies available can include back pay, reinstatement or front pay, and attorney's fees. Those are individual remedies, awarded to a named person, enforceable by a judgment.

Getting there is difficult, and we want to be careful not to imply otherwise. Over the last two years the courts of appeals have addressed a series of threshold questions in these cases:

• In Ringhofer v. Mayo Clinic Ambulance, 102 F.4th 894 (8th Cir. 2024), the

Eighth Circuit held that a protected religious belief need not be "uniform across all members of a religion or acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others," and reversed the dismissal of claims by five employees.

• In Bube v. Aspirus Hospital, Inc., 108 F.4th 1017 (7th Cir. 2024), the

Seventh Circuit held that a request based at least in part on religious belief is a religious accommodation request, and reversed.

• In Brokken v. Hennepin County, 140 F.4th 445 (8th Cir. 2025), the Eighth

Circuit held that retiring rather than lose substantial accrued benefits could be an adverse employment action at the pleading stage, and reversed in part.

Each of those decisions sent a case back to a district court to be litigated. None of them ended in a judgment on appeal, and none of them awarded anyone damages. They are procedural rulings, and describing them as anything more would be inaccurate.

But they are procedural rulings about real people with names, whose individual cases are now proceeding. That is the difference we are pointing at.

The limits worth stating plainly

Because this is the moment when people ask, we should be direct about what these cases are not.

We handle employment claims, religious accommodation cases against employers. We do not bring, and are not in a position to bring, claims against federal officials over pandemic policy, or claims against vaccine manufacturers. Federal law substantially forecloses much of that terrain, including through immunity provisions that apply to countermeasures during a declared public health emergency. Anyone suggesting those cases are readily available is not describing the law accurately.

We also take no position, in this article or in our practice, on vaccine safety, efficacy, or the origins of the virus. Those are not employment law questions and they are not ours to answer. Our cases turn on a narrower and more answerable one: when an employee's sincere religious belief conflicts with a condition of employment, what does the law require the employer to do?

Where that leaves you

If you lost a job over an accommodation denial, the honest picture is this. The national argument will continue and will not do anything for you personally. The process that could is an individual legal claim, it is harder than a hearing, it is slower, and it runs on deadlines that have already closed for many people.

Title VII charges generally must be filed with the EEOC within 300 days of the adverse action in Minnesota. Minnesota Human Rights Act claims generally within one year. A notice of appeal from a federal dismissal is generally due 30 days from entry of judgment. Those are general rules with fact-specific exceptions, and they are the reason to make a call rather than to keep reading.

We'll tell you on the first call, at no charge, whether we think you have something. If you don't, we'll tell you that, and you can stop watching hearings waiting for an answer that isn't coming from there.

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